March 17, 2010

Why Does Every New Service Want To Be GrandCentral Reincarnated?

I find it amazing how many "new" services either come to me for representation or I read about who choose to position themselves as "another take on GrandCentral/GoogleVoice." Talk about being super "me too." Take the About.com recap about PhoneBooth, a new service from Bandwidth.com. The about.com piece screams of messaging and positioning that's all GoogleVoice this and GoogleVoice that, even going so far as to be labeled "an alternative" in the story. And in fairness to Nadeem, he didn't jump to that conclusion. The PhoneBooth brand story, positioning and messaging led him there.

So what if PhoneBooth offers GV like Find Me, Follow Me as well as second number that can terminate anywhere. So does Line2 and Line2 offers more with the ability to present your "other" number, just like the failed, TalkPlus which may have had the best idea ever for mobile phones.

The real offer from PhoneBooth, from what I see, lies in their PhoneBooth On Demand service offering which is where for $20.00 a month some advance features come into play.

Bandwidth.com is clearly building out application based services to put more minutes on their network and for them, services like PhoneBooth and FreePbx are strides in the right direction.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I guess they all want to be GC reincarnated, because GC is amazing, but GC is also very poorly organized, and all these new services want to demonstrate how much better another approach works.

My main beef with GC is how there are tons of awesome features that are hidden until you enable another feature that doesn't, by itself, sound interesting, and there are little floating dropdown menus that appear in unmarked hotspots when you right-click, etc. All "web too point oh-oh-oh". It's a terrible paradigm for exhibiting what your company's software can do. I much prefer a hierarchical administration screen with disabled features greyed out... that way I can at least notice them and investigate how to turn them on.